Oops, almost forgot to respond to Arti!
Okay, now that we're about halfway through the season it might be neat to take a sec and see not where hype succeeded, but where it failed and where it missed the train in the first place.
What's your biggest disappointment/letdown show of the season so far?
Conversely, what show was a pleasant surprise and is becoming an unexpected favorite?
Biggest disappointment of the season is without a doubt
Kyoukai no Kanata. I'd tempered my expectations somewhat knowing that the story came from KyoAni's light novel factory and sounded so generic, but even so the prospect of KyoAni doing an action anime had me quite excited. I didn't expect the anime to make me feel so overwhelmingly apathetic. No KyoAni show has ever done that for me before (
Free! came closest, but that was mainly because of the target gender bias, and I venture even that show felt more engaging than KnK does).
Some people seem to think that
KnK is just a continuation of an existing pattern, but I don't think there's any comparison between it and the likes of
Chuuni or
Tamako. Those shows were unambitious and occasionally faltered, but still contained all the charm that I expect from a KyoAni show and were plenty entertaining enough to keep me looking forward to each new episode every week. KnK is far, far worse than either of those shows for me. Hopefully it's just a one-off, and KyoAni will be back on form once they move on to non-KnK material.
Runner-up for biggest disappointment:
BlazBlue: Alter Memory, for which I went in with low expectations and the show managed to go even lower.
As for my biggest pleasant surprise of the season
I'd like to say
Non Non Biyori, but that would be a lie. I got exactly what I expected out of that show, and it was wonderful. No, the real answer is probably
NouCome, which I was expecting to be unimpressive trashy tripe that
might be sort of worthwhile for its fun-sounding gimmick, but actually turned out to be the
best kind of trashy tripe, whose gimmick was every bit as entertaining as I hoped and whose entertainment value was far higher than it had any right to be.
Runner-up for biggest pleasant surprise:
Golden Time, which I had a sort-of good feeling about before the season started, but it was marred by the fact that I found the character designs so unsuited to my tastes, particularly the lead girl. I was in no way expecting all of its characters to charm me so much, and Kouko, who was my biggest worry, turned out to be the best of the lot. I could never have predicted that this would be one of my favourite shows of the season, but there you have it.
But I'd rather Onoda be aware of the dangers of competitive cycling than be ignorant and possibly end up in the hospital. I want him to be safe for when he achieves his dream of riding with Imaizumi and Naruko!
